Summary

This immediately engaging resource will help anyone understand how to write better with a thematically-organized collection of readings (organized around the theme of "in-between-ness"), a writing guide, and a concise handbook. Engages readers through the theme of in-between-ness and helps readers to become better writers with an easy to understand writing guide. Readings on being caught between generations, living with diverse cultures, dealing with gender conflicts, and exploring differing perceptions of the self and others. Writing Guide. Handbook. General interest.

Table of Contents

New selections are marked with an

Thematic Contents

Rhetorical Contents

Preface

The Reader ?

Getting the Most from Your Reading

Active Reading

Thanksgiving Ellen Goodman

At Thanksgiving, we realize that we are "a part of and apart from" our families-"raised in families...to be individuals."

Discussion of Active Reading

Active Reading as Prewriting

Practicing Active Reading

Between Generations

My Son, My Compass Janna Malamud Smith?

A son questions his family's diet, expounding on the "inhumanity of mass meat consumption" until he finally convinces his parents of the "ethical, practical, and ecological issues" involved in eating red meat

The Long Way Home

The "stench" of asafetida and the sounds of pulverizing

Ginger root and garlic woke the author when she was a child

But it was many years before her mother would relinquish the kitchen and her secret recipes

So her daughter could create her own Indian dinners

The Good Daughter

Immigrant parents make many sacrifices for their daughter

Is she then "indentured" to her parents, forced to "straddle two cultures"?

A son convinces his parents of the "ethical, practical, and ecological issues"

My Grandfather and the Bomb Jennet Conan?

The grand daughter of a scientist who helped create the atomic

Bomb-"the most diabolical weapon in the history of mankind"-mourns her grandfather's

Role in the devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki Devastation

That he never intended but that his family can never escape

Breaking Tradition Janice Mirikitan?

Having discovered "the lies my mother told me,"

The narrator longs to communicate more openly with her daughter whose

"secretive eyes are walls of smoke / and music and telephones.rdquo?

The Only Child

"Speed kills slowly, and he fiddled too much with the oxygen flow to his brain," says the author of his drug-addicted brother

Are Families Dangerous?

Barbara Ehrenreich?

While the family can teach "the finest things human beings can learn from one another,"

Too often the family teaches "nasty things like hate and rage and shame."?

Ignorance Is Not Bliss Eric Marcus?

The author's family is afraid that revealing his homosexuality will "kill" his grandmother

But in the end, the truth brings them closer

Blue Spruce

When the town manicurist was pregnant with his child, the barber "bundled her out of town." H